audit

Over the summer, Audit Scotland ran a survey to try to capture the views of parents and carers about their experiences of early learning and childcare in Scotland. This was a key part of our preparations for a new audit of these services, to give an independent assessment of how the system is working and what outcomes are being delivered for people who access this support.

It was the first time that Audit Scotland had directly reached out families who use these services, so we weren’t sure what kind of response to expect. We were really pleased with the result, as dozens of individuals and organisations helped to spread the word about the survey and over 300 people completed the questionnaire.

We learned a lot from the engagement, and collected some really useful material, including individual stories. Our early analysis of the responses shows a range of recurring views, including the positive impact that early learning and childcare can have on a child’s development and wellbeing.

However, concerns were raised on issues such as the cost of services, a lack of choice, and limited flexibility, particularly for working or studying parents.

It’s important to highlight that reform of early learning and childcare is continuing: in her September announcement on the 2016/17 Programme for Government, the First Minister set out a commitment to double the amount of free care available to all three and four-year-olds, and two-year-olds who will benefit most, by the end of the Scottish Parliament’s fifth session.

This means that our audit will be a timely and relevant contribution to the future development of early learning and childcare services. The views contributed by parents and carers have helped us to lay the groundwork for our audit and shape what questions we want to answer. There are a number of insights that we’ll investigate further and test out during the course of our fieldwork. We’ve set out more detail about our work – which we’ll carry out on behalf of the Auditor General and the Accounts Commission – in a new flyer.

One thing that’s certain is that we want to continue engaging with parents and carers, and we’re looking forward to building on the great response we’ve had so far.

We’ll continue to post updates about when we’ll publish our audit report as our work develops in the coming year – watch this space for news.

About the author

Rebecca Smallwood is an auditor and joined Audit Scotland in 2008. She has worked on a number of audits with a health and social care focus, including community health partnerships, emergency departments and reshaping care for older people.

I was part of the team taking Audit Scotland’s first look at the entire higher education sector, which attracts a growing number of students and is internationally renowned. More than 50,000 students from outside the UK came to Scotland to study in 2014/15, and almost all Scottish universities deliver higher education abroad, either by running overseas campuses, through partnerships with other universities, or through distance learning.

In 2014/15, the Scottish Government provided over £1.7bn in funding, made up of direct funding to universities and financial support to individual students, such as paying tuition fees and funding student loans. Our report raises important issues about the use of public funding, and the challenges facing both universities and the Scottish Government if the sector is to stay successful, and if the Scottish Government’s policy ambitions are to be achieved.

For example, one of our key findings is that it’s becoming increasingly difficult for Scottish students to get a university place in Scotland. There’s a need for greater understanding of trends in applications, offer rates, and acceptances to assess what impact Scottish Government policies are having on access to university for Scottish and EU students. This is one of several recommendations we make in our report, touching on areas such as student support, widening access and the role of the Scottish Funding Council (SFC)

The review of higher education was followed by Audit Scotland’s annual look at the performance of Scotland’s colleges. This piece of work was managed by my colleague Stuart Nugent. You can listen to Stuart discuss the key findings of that report here. Though colleges and universities are very different bodies in a number of ways, both sectors face challenges. In the case of colleges, substantial reforms have transformed the way that they operate and deliver services.

Our latest review of the college sector found that it is financially stable and achieving learning targets, whilst still adjusting to the big changes it’s experienced in recent years. However, several issues remain outstanding if the full effects of government reforms are to be understood and addressed by the sector.

Like universities, the college sector is experiencing changes within its student population – though for different reasons – such as growing numbers of under-25s in full-time education and reductions in women and over-25s. Our report states that the Scottish Government, the SFC and colleges need to work together to improve their understanding of demand for courses across the country, and create long-term plans for how they will commit finances and staff to meet future need.

Both of these reports have generated a lot of ongoing debate about the future challenges facing the respective sectors, and how to manage them. The Scottish Government and SFC have responded to both reports ahead of Thursday’s meeting and once we present our findings to the Public Audit and Post-Legislative Scrutiny Committee, members will then decide what action they would like to take to continue their scrutiny of the sectors.

For our part, the audit teams will continue to explore ways to engage with stakeholders on our recommendations and share the knowledge we’ve gained through our work. For example, I’ve been travelling round the country since July, presenting our findings at universities and sector events and it’s been really interesting to hear the range of views on what approach should be taken to deal with the challenges ahead.

We’ll use this feedback to consider how we can focus our future audit work on education, and will post updates on our website as that starts to take shape.

About the author

Kirsty Whyte managed our audit of higher education in Scottish universities. She has worked at Audit Scotland for over 12 years undertaking performance audits on a wide range of topics across the whole of the public sector, including school education, the use of locum doctors in the NHS, and efforts to reduce reoffending.

Everyone knows that where you live has a major impact on your life chances, and that disadvantage is concentrated in particular geographies.

Charles Booth’s famous poverty maps of London were prepared in 1889. In Scotland, we’ve had decades of high quality research by places like the Glasgow Centre for Population Health (GCPH) into the impact that Glasgow’s industrial heritage and clusters of poverty and deprivation have on peoples’ health and life chances.

This is important information, affecting individuals and communities day in and day out across Scotland. Tackling the root causes of what drives these cycles of deprivation and poor outcomes is one of the country’s most pressing problems if it wants to create a fair and just society.

That’s why the Improvement Service ran a recent conference exploring the links between community planning – public bodies working with communities to improve their local area – and spatial planning, which has traditionally been about buildings and infrastructure. The conclusion from the event was that while these two activities have lots in common they’ve traditionally worked quite separately from each other.

As budgets reduce that’s just not sustainable, and in the context of the Community Empowerment legislation, local people need to have more of a say in how their area should be developed and improved. We echoed that message in our third update report on Community Planning in Scotland, recommending that the Scottish Government and CPPs ensure communities are given a strong voice in planning local services.

David Martin, Chief Executive of Dundee City Council, and Colin Mair, Chief Executive of the Improvement Service, didn’t shy away from challenging planners of every stripe to really push the envelope and be ambitious in working together to address shared concerns around Jobs, Community Safety, Health and Well-being.

For me, it was a lightbulb moment. Obviously councils need local development plans. They also need a Single Outcome Agreement and locality plans, plus lots of other plans and strategies but streamlining and aligning activity has to make sense. So does making better use of the shared intelligence that community planners and spatial planners have about the needs and concerns of local communities.

Some places, like East Ayrshire already do this. They use their Community Plan as the sovereign document which drives everything that they do (including their work with partners). But for many at the conference there was a sense that this is a journey that they’ve yet to really embark on.

It won’t be easy. Community planning and spatial planning operate under different and at times potentially contradictory legislation and they have different cultures and perspectives. But, what was exciting was the strong commitment to try and work through those challenges to focus on what really matters, improving the lives of local people, and reducing inequalities.

There’s no doubt that this is a busy and exciting time for anyone with an interest in Scotland’s political and financial landscape. Generating a lot of discussion is the Scotland Bill 2015, set to grant further financial powers to the Scottish Parliament and establish a new fiscal framework which could substantially revise its budgetary and funding arrangements. All of this is taking place while new financial powers in the Scotland Act 2012 are being implemented.

A number of Scottish and UK parliamentary committees have taken an interest in the development of new financial powers. Audit Scotland also has key role to play in this fast changing area of public finances, and we’ve been one of many public bodies asked to give views to Parliament on this important area.

We set out initial views on the audit arrangements for any new financial powers in a submission to the Public Audit Committee in August 2015, and I gave evidence on behalf of Audit Scotland to the Finance Committee’s inquiry on the Scottish Fiscal Commission Bill. The Commission plays a vital scrutiny role by providing independent assessments of forecasts of tax revenues, and its remit is likely to grow with further financial devolution.

We’ve also looked closely at how implementation of the Scotland Act 2012 has been prepared for, and managed; we first reported on progress in December 2014, and we’ve recently published a follow-up to this work, available here.

Our latest update explained how Revenue Scotland – the body responsible for the administration of the newly devolved Land and Buildings Transaction Tax and the Scottish Landfill Tax – effectively managed risks to make sure they were delivered successfully from April last year. In short, a good news story, though there’s still a lot of work ahead.

We also reported that some arrangements to manage the powers in the Act (and potentially the Scotland Bill 2015) beyond this year are still being developed, which is reasonable. However, we’ve highlighted the need for the Scottish Government to be able to move quickly once key agreements are reached, so it can be in a position to manage the new powers well and deliver financial reporting that’s comprehensive, transparent, reliable and timely.

MSPs will also hear from the Auditor General on other interesting new work which has seen Audit Scotland provide assurance to Parliament on an audit of the Scottish Rate of Income Tax (SRIT). We reviewed the National Audit Office’s first annual audit of HMRC’s implementation of the SRIT, which comes into force in April 2016. The Auditor General will report annually to the audit committee on the NAO’s work in this area, and it’s provided a great opportunity for us to work with another UK audit body.

Public audit provides assurance that public money is well managed. This is important for the public and decision-makers, and will become even more relevant as Scotland takes on further financial powers. For Audit Scotland, it means that the scope of our work will likely become more wide-ranging and diverse.

About the author

Mark Taylor is an Assistant Director in Audit Scotland. He oversees a wide portfolio of central government audits, including the Scottish Government audit.

Big changes are bringing together health and social care services in Scotland.

Traditionally, the NHS has provided health services and councils have provided social care. The new reforms will see these services planned and resourced by one local organisation, intended to create a seamless system which gives people the care they need, at the right time and place.

All adult social care and some health services including GPs, community healthcare, and certain hospital services (those which are mainly unplanned, such as A&E) are covered by the reforms. This makes the potential impact of integration wide reaching, as it involves services relied on by many. And as a country, we’re getting older, which means it’s likely the number of people needing health and social care services will increase in the years to come.

We also found some evidence to suggest that local areas might not be in a position to make a huge difference in 2016/17. There are difficulties agreeing how much money councils and NHS boards will bring together to provide integrated services. This, combined with uncertainty about much funding will be available in the longer term, means some local areas don’t have clear plans for how and when services will change.

If integration is going to make a real difference to people who use health and social care services, it’s important that all local areas make detailed plans for how they’ll make the necessary changes. It’s also important to be clear how they will measure the impact of these changes.

We found other issues that need resolved if the reforms are to be successful. For example, the new system is complicated, and it’ll be important that each local area makes clear, to both staff and the public, who is responsible for the health and social care provided.

There are also issues relating to available staff in health and social care. These include considering how this workforce can best contribute to changes to the services provided and how to recruit people into jobs where there are shortages of suitably skilled staff.

Like the different bodies involved in integration, Audit Scotland recognises the importance of getting this right and the consequences if that doesn’t happen, and we’ve made detailed recommendations to support improvement in our report to the Accounts Commission and the Auditor General. We’ll begin the next audit looking at the further progress of integration in early 2017.

In the meantime, we’re discussing our findings and recommendations with members of the Scottish Parliament’s Public Audit Committee on Wednesday (13 January). You can view the agenda, and watch the meeting live, via the Parliament’s website.

About the author

Rebecca Smallwood is an auditor and joined Audit Scotland in 2008. She has worked on a number of audits with a health and social care focus, including community health partnerships, emergency departments and reshaping care for older people.

These agencies have a specific remit to generate economic growth across Scotland. They spend around £380 million a year supporting Scotland’s businesses and industry sectors. Our work will provide an independent assessment of what this money is spent on, and what it achieves. You can find out more about how we’re carrying out this work in our project flyer.

Since beginning the audit we have spoken to a few businesses and business representative groups who’ve received some form of support from the agencies. This has helped us gather insight into how SE and HIE operate and support economic growth in Scotland.

That work is ongoing, and we’re now inviting businesses to get in touch to share views and experiences with us.

We’d welcome responses from businesses who’ve received any form of support from SE and HIE. We’d like to hear from you on what went well, what could have gone better, and what benefits you and your business gained from the experience.

We also want to hear from you if your business was unable to access support from SE or HIE. What were the reasons for this, and were these reasons clearly explained to you?

We won’t publish individual responses, but will use the information we receive to help build a fuller picture of how economic development is progressing in Scotland, and to help compile our findings.

Our report, which we plan to publish in summer 2016, will highlight good practice and make relevant recommendations to help improve public sector economic development activity.

If you’d like to participate or have any queries, please get in touch by 5pm on Friday, December 11th 2015 by emailing me at gdiamond@audit-scotland.gov.uk or by telephoning 0131 625 1820. You can also write to the audit team at 102 West Port, Edinburgh, EH3 9DN.

About the author

Gemma Diamond, senior manager, has worked on a wide range of audits across the public sector since joining Audit Scotland in 2010. She currently leads Audit Scotland’s economic development portfolio.

What’s that about, you may ask? It might sound a bit like a plot from Yes Minister (no, that was the Department of Administrative Affairs) but in fact, it’s more important (and complex) than you might think. It’s about the part of the justice system concerned with decision-making by public bodies that affect your rights and interests.

In Scotland, councils make most administrative justice decisions, examples include school placement requests, planning permission, parking and bus lane enforcement and over 40 kinds of licencing from alcohol and gambling to pedicabs and rickshaws.

For the complete unexpurgated list, you can view the newly launched report Making decisions fairly – Developing excellence in administrative justice in Scottish councils. The project looked at a representative selection of local authority decision-making areas to model the user journey through these administrative justice processes. It provides a whole system view of the decision making areas, including the appeal or review processes and attaches indicative costs to each part of the process.

Having effective decision-making, complaints, and appeals processes is also important for councils’ reputations and can help them improve services and, most importantly, people’s experience of those services. We also found that empowering frontline staff to vary decisions or find alternative solutions for service users could reduce appeals and complaints and achieve moderate savings.

Administrative justice is also a crucially important for how we in Audit Scotland carry out our work, as looking at services from the viewpoint of the user provides us with a fresh and valuable perspective. For example, a service user trying to negotiate through paperwork and online forms to gain access to services or get permissions and licences will have had a unique experience of the decision making processes within a council.

About the author

John Lincoln is an audit manager within Audit Scotland’s Performance Audit and Best Value team. His next project will be leading on an audit of social work services in Scotland, which is expected to report in Summer 2016.

As we move into increasingly uncharted territory of more preventative, place-based public service delivery, reflecting the post-Christie agenda, there’s a growing need for audit and inspection to adapt. This will help us to better understand what difference public services (and their third and private sector partners) are making in giving Scotland’s communities the opportunity to fulfil their full potential.

Scotland has 19 higher education institutions, ranging from ancient universities like St Andrews to those established in the last 25 years. Some have a very specific focus, such as the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. What they all have in common is providing a massive range of opportunities for learning and research.